Chapter 1 – I am God

Theology — Faith & the Secular

The most frightening thing I have ever seen was not suffering. It was suffering beneath a beautiful sky. A child may die at noon and still the light will continue to pour through the hospital window, which is why I find it easier to believe that God exists than to believe that His concern, if it exists at all, resembles ours: creation seems to require an origin, but suffering does not seem to behave as though it is supervised by love. I do not write this as an act of contempt. Faith, for many, is not a failure of reason but a form of endurance; a language by which human beings carry grief without being entirely crushed beneath it. Nor is this an attempt to reduce the sacred to arithmetic, as though the oldest questions of the human spirit could be solved with the cold finality of an equation — certainly not one developed by me. Rather, I want to approach the question from a narrower and perhaps more unsettling place: not from scripture, inheritance, or consolation, but from what can be reasonably inferred from the fact that anything exists at all. In that limited sense, I find disbelief in God less persuasive than belief. Not necessarily belief in the God of childhood paintings, with a white beard and human temper; nor necessarily the God who intervenes in examinations, illnesses, elections, traffic lights, and private disappointments. By God, I mean something more primordial: the first creative condition, the initiating force, the source from which the possibility of existence first opened. A line drawn across a page may wander in any direction, but it cannot author its own beginning. A universe may expand, mutate, cool, burn, and bloom into consciousness, but the fact of its being still presses against the mind like a locked door. Something, somehow, must have turned the handle.

Grant, then, that the handle was turned. The more harrowing question is not whether a hand exists, but what manner of hand it was — for the same logic that renders a first cause plausible offers no assurance whatsoever that this cause is tender, attentive, or even aware that we are here. We have inherited from centuries of theology a quiet and convenient elision between the Creator and the Carer, as though the force capable of igniting a hundred billion galaxies must, by the same gesture, trouble itself over the falling of a single sparrow. Yet nothing in the architecture of the cosmos compels this intimacy. The same sun that ripens the wheat will, with no alteration of temperament, scorch the field; the same tide that carries the fishing boat home will, without apology, swallow the child who wandered too far from shore. Pascal, gazing into the vault of the night, confessed that the eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me — and it is precisely the silence, not the absence, that unnerves. An absent God could be mourned and moved past; a silent one keeps us forever leaning toward the door, listening. Simone Weil, who knew affliction not as a theory but as a weight, located the deepest spiritual terror not in God’s non-existence but in His apparent withdrawal — the sense that, in the hour of greatest need, the heavens decline to look back. Dostoevsky gave this protest its most unanswerable form: Ivan Karamazov, who does not deny God so much as return his ticket, refusing entry to any paradise whose foundations are laid upon the unredeemed suffering of even one tortured child. No future harmony, he insists, can retroactively justify a present scream. And here the abstraction acquires a horribly local face. When the skies above New South Wales turned a sick and biblical orange during the Black Summer of 2019, the sun did not dim out of grief; it simply burned, indifferent, behind the smoke, while towns it had warmed for generations turned to ash beneath it. Suffering, once again, beneath a beautiful sky. Yet perhaps the most instructive cruelty of our age is not the indifference of the heavens but the indifference we have learned to manufacture in their place. Consider Robodebt — that automated Australian apparatus which, between 2015 and 2019, raised hundreds of thousands of unlawful debts by the crude expedient of averaging a year’s income across fortnights in which it was never earned. The Royal Commission would later describe it, in 2023, as “a crude and cruel mechanism, neither fair nor legal,” one that traumatised people on the off chance they might owe money — debt notices arriving at Christmas, the young driven to despair, and, the Commissioner recorded, at least one young man driven to take his own life. Here was a god of our own design: omnipresent, unaccountable, incapable of mercy because incapable of attention, dispensing judgement from a height it never thought to question. Whether the silence is cosmic or bureaucratic, the experience of standing beneath it is the same — the upturned face, the unanswered question, the dawning recognition that the system, like the sky, was never built to look back.

If the heavens are silent, the more urgent question for a civilisation is what becomes of it when it ceases, at last, to listen for a reply at all. Nietzsche’s madman did not announce the death of God with triumph but with horror, demanding of the marketplace who had given us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon — for he understood that to unfasten the earth from its sun is not liberation alone but vertigo, an “infinite nothing” breathing at our backs. Max Weber named the long aftermath disenchantment: a world in which every mystery is, in principle, calculable, and nothing remains that cannot be weighed, priced, or optimised. The philosopher Charles Taylor sharpened the point further — we have travelled, he argued, from an age in which belief was the unexamined air one breathed to one in which it is merely a single option on a crowded shelf, and in the process we have become buffered selves, sealed against the transcendent, no longer porous to anything beyond the boundary of our own skin. Nowhere is this migration more visible than in contemporary Australia. In the space of a single five-year census, the proportion of Australians identifying as Christian fell from 52 per cent in 2016 to 44 per cent in 2021, while almost 40 per cent — 38.9 per cent — now report no religion at all, up from 30 per cent only five years earlier and just 22 per cent a decade before that; our young, by international measure, rank among the least religious people on earth, and the great rites of passage have quietly secularised in step, with civil celebrants now presiding over the overwhelming majority of marriages and funerals. But nature, and the human heart, abhor a vacuum. The altar is vacated; it is not abandoned. In the absence of a transcendent order, four secular narratives have rushed to occupy the empty sanctuary, each promising what religion once promised — meaning, belonging, transcendence, a moral architecture — and each, untethered from the humility the old faiths at least gestured toward, prone to curdle. The first is the Market, which preaches salvation by acquisition, converting the shopping centre into cathedral and the credit limit into the measure of a soul — the very monoculture of buy or be bought. The second is the Self, the therapeutic gospel of authenticity and wellness, in which “my truth” becomes the last sacred object and the inward gaze the only permissible pilgrimage. The third is the Screen, whose feed is liturgy and whose front-facing camera is confessional, offering in the algorithm a new and tireless omniscience that watches, ranks, and remembers. And the fourth is the Cause — politics and identity elevated into vessels for the moral absolutes and tribal belonging the church once supplied, complete with its heretics, its purifications, and its promised millennium. Each is a real hunger wearing a hollow costume; and the costs of the substitution are tallied in the epidemic of loneliness, in the rising deaths of despair, in a generation more connected and less consoled than any before it. I do not write this as a summons backward. The retreat of religion has loosened cruelties as well as comforts — the sectarian malice that once stained job advertisements with Protestants preferred, the criminalisation of love now recognised as a right, the long machinery of shame turned upon the different. As Popper reminded us, growth itself depends upon disagreement, and a society freed to dissent is not a society impoverished. The question, then, is not whether we ought to return to the faith of our grandmothers. It is whether the secular order can carry the weight the old faiths once carried — the binding we, the horizon of meaning, the insistence that the suffering one is seen — without the consolations it has so cheerfully discarded.

My grandmother died in a hospital with a window, and the light came through it at noon exactly as it had on every ordinary day she had ever lived. She had prayed each morning of her life, fingering beads worn smooth as river stones, lighting a small candle that always seemed faintly absurd to me — a single flame struck in a room already flooded with sun, as though the daylight required her permission to exist. She never once tried to argue me into her God. She simply lived as if the silence were listening; as if the universe, for all its vastness and its indifference, could be answered by the smallness of a lit wick and a bowed head. I have spent the years since persuaded, on the evidence, that she was reaching toward a door that does not open — and yet I have come to suspect that the metaphysical accuracy of her faith was never the point of it. What she possessed was not a theory of the cosmos but a refusal of its scale; a stubborn conviction that the dying woman in the next bed mattered, that the child who died at noon mattered, that she mattered, regardless of whether the sky agreed. Perhaps this is what the secular age, in its hurry to wipe away the horizon, risks misplacing: not the answer to the great question, which may have no answer, but the candle lit against it — the human gesture, scaled to the human hand, that insists on light even where it cannot prove the dark is listening. We may never know whose hand first turned the handle, or whether that hand cares at all that we are cold on the other side of the door. But there is another hand, nearer and warmer and entirely within our reach: the one we place upon another’s in the silence of a hospital room, when there is nothing whatsoever to say. If God will not look back at us, then we are left with the harder and more sacred labour of looking back at one another. The light still pours through the window. The only open question is whether we will be the ones to notice that someone beneath it is suffering — and to answer, where the heavens will not, I am here.